In our group of 4, we traveled to Kampot, Cambodia. We arrived on Sunday and departed on Friday. We did service for 3 days at ChumKriel Language School. For the last day, we did an activity (yoga) & walked around taking pictures of Kampot.
Service
We taught at CLS from 8 am to 7 pm with a 2-hour lunch break. This consisted of 6 classes. The children varied between the ages of 6 to 18.
On the first day it was a little frustrating and tiring since other groups weren’t doing as much as us. Especially for me, since I’m more introverted I get tired more quickly spending too much time around people. Generally, when I do service at school with the elderly or migrant workers it’s not as tiring. Plus, we only spend a maximum of 1.5 hours of service per week. By the end of the week I gained more pride of being able to persevere through the long hours. I noticed that I had more stamina when it came to this compared to my teammates and other students in my grade. Or it may not even be my stamina but my positive morale.
I would say the first day was the hardest not just physically but on our morale. The first activities we were involved with were agriculture and sustainability which made us feel quite useless as we were just doing simple things. We felt as if we were making no impact on their education.
Over the course of the three days, we taught the kids phonetics, pronunciation and helped with their conceptualisation. English is hard to teach when it’s your first language and their second language. It’s harder because I didn’t know Khmer. They can spell out and pronounce words however they have a hard time conceptualising the meaning behind words in English.
I mostly recognised this when we were teaching in the evening classes from 5pm to 7pm. The evening classes are for the students that worked or are busy during school hours so they drop in for an hour to learn English only.
We helped with improving speaking and listening skills as well as reading comprehension. We were separated to assist 4 teachers. This was quite unexpected and I felt quite unprepared. It was rather frightening at first since I’m quite shy and I’m not very good at projecting my voice. Despite that, I knew that this was a better use of our skills since we could help more people. The first day was hard only because we were so tired and demoralized from previous events.
On the first day I stood in front of the class and they asked me questions to practice their pronunciation. Their pronunciation and questions were quite good which was a little surprising since they can’t join letters together. I think that this may have been due to memorization. I asked them questions as well, I asked them the same questions they asked me and saw that their comprehension of those were good as well. I suppose my English proficiency exposed them to an American or more foreign accent. This is good because then they will be able to comprehend the words foreigners say to them.
I also helped the teacher with holding up letters and making them pronounce the alphabets. Their pronunciation was decent so I was confused but I soon realised this was done to drill the letters into their heads. When they had to put the letters together to form words such as “can” and “hat” they struggled to join phonetics together.
Now looking back on the experience, I know that this was not voluntourism as I did not have that mentality of coming in as the ‘rich kids who will save them’. Instead, I genuinely wanted my skills and abilities to be helpful to them. I also realized that this cannot be completely accomplished in the small span of three days. However, I know that whatever I did hopefully help someone with their English proficiency. Even if it is just their confidence to talk to foreigners or the pronunciation of a word.
Activity
For our last day, we did yoga. Which wasn’t anything too different from the things I did in Singapore for seasons 1 & 2. We just did a few new poses as well old ones (for example Sun Salutation & Pigeon Pose). Even though I hadn’t done yoga for 3 months I still felt as flexible as before even maybe a bit more. I don’t think I learned anything in particular but it was definitely relaxing after 3 days of long service hours.
Collaborating as a group
Collaboration was one of the most challenging parts of the trip. I felt like I did most of the work due to our not so perfect communication. All of us were either never on social media, never replied to messages or were too busy with other priorities. Due to these reasons, I had to make certain decisions on my own and report back to the team. Sometimes these things even flew over the heads of my teammates which led to me being a bit frustrated. However, I let these go since I knew from prior experience in group works that frustration would only lead to lower quality work. (LO5)
LO2 – Leaving my comfort zone and confronting public speaking
LO3 – Having things change in the plan making it more unexpected
LO6 – English proficiency in non-English speaking countries and how they learn English. The effect of a country’s past on the present society (Khmer Rouge).
